General topic: Cognition, language, and culture

Most topics are worked on in collaboration with Andrea Bender. Short descriptions are provided below together with the two most recent publications.

Numerical cognition and counting systems

Number words are among the first mathematical concepts that children acquire. They constitute a system with specific properties (like base, extent, and regularity), and are an important tool for numerical tasks. How did these systems develop linguistically? How much variation do we observe cross-culturally? And which cognitive implications arise from their specific properties for learning and doing mathematical tasks?

Causal cognition, language, and culture

The concept of causality is one of the core concepts that helps people to understand how the world works. Causal knowledge enables them to make predictions and to find explanations for why things happen the way they do. Are people's explanations of simple physical phenomena universal or do they vary cross-culturally? And is the way they assign causality affected by the way events are described?

Spatial and temporal references

When describing relations between objects or events, we inevitably have to choose a frame of reference (FoR). Across languages and cultures, preferences for spatial FoRs differ. Which variant is preferred when another person's perspective has to be adopted? And, given that people tend to think about time in terms of space, how much of what we know about spatial FoRs is applicable to temporal FoRs?

Grammatical gender and its cognitive effects

In languages with gender systems, nouns are assigned to one of several classes that determine the declension of associated words. About two classes, masculine and feminine, a debate has ignited on whether the grammatical gender of a noun affects how its referent is conceptualized: Is the sun in German (die Sonne) conceived of as more female as the moon (der Mond) because the former is feminine while the latter is masculine?

Content effects in reasoning

The phenomenon that the content of an (logical) argument influences the conclusions people draw from it is known at least since the work of Wilkins (1928) on syllogistic reasoning. Nevertheless, the study of content effects is highly topical in the psychology of reasoning. What do these effects tell us about how the mind works? And what do they tell us about people's understanding of the contents involved?

Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard.2017.Agents and patients in physical settings: Linguistic cues affect the assignment of causality in German and Tongan.Frontiers in Psychology.8: 1-16. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01093

Beller, Sieghard.2014.Cultural Development of Mathematical Ideas: The Papua New Guinea Studies by Geoffrey B. Saxe. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2012. xiii-362 pp.ETHOS: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.42: E3-E5. Published 2014-04-15.doi: 10.1111/etho.12050

Bender, Andrea; Beller, Sieghard.2014.Mangarevan invention of binary steps for easier calculation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.111: 1322-1327. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1309160110